THE SHIRT
RESEARCH + CONCEPT
Lotte van Hulst
PHOTOGRAPHY
Lotte van Hulst
STYLING ADVICE
Reira Yoshimori
One of the first things I became interested in, thinking about how football produces legitimacy, was the football shirt.
Not as merchandise, but as something that moves.
Shirts circulate.
They show up in places far from where they originate.
On local pitches, in city squares, at markets, worn by people with no direct connection to the club or nation. Still, they carry recognition.
When a team that was relatively unknown suddenly wins something significant, you start to notice a shift. In the weeks after, the shirt appears more often. It enters everyday space and becomes visible beyond its original context.
I approach the football shirt as a spatial artefact. Not as branding, and not only as identity, but as a carrier of visual culture shaped by football’s inherent politicality.
Football is not neutral. It is structured through national narratives, contested territories, migration, exclusion, and claims to recognition. The shirt condenses these conditions into a visible, wearable form.
When worn, it produces a small but precise territorial claim. It marks a body, and by extension, a position in space. As it travels, it maps a dispersed geography of affiliation. It doesn’t redraw borders, but it makes certain alignments visible.
The work sits between design and critical spatial analysis. On one hand, it acknowledges the language of contemporary sportswear as a serious cultural medium. On the other, it examines how that medium participates in the production of space: how sovereignty can be rehearsed, suggested, or staged through circulation rather than law.